“It is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.” —Hawthorne
When I finished Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers last month I wanted to post something here more than the “finished reading” flag that feels like awarding myself a medal; but I didn’t get around to it. Read Morten Høi Jensen’s review instead, and then do read the book:
For the most part, they are characters we only ever know socially, as it were, either in dialogue or by their consumption of goods. Yet by fixing the narrative in their various households and domestic concerns, Tergit’s novel rebels against the remorseless one-way traffic of history. Here, banal instances of private life jostle against political turning points. Tergit’s novel rescues those moments that history would not only fail to record but would obliterate the memory of….
Naturally, it is difficult to read Effingers without also reading the Holocaust back into its pages, yet the novel frustrates this response by the sheer abundance of life it evokes. Tergit, writing to a publisher in 1949, was adamant that what she had written was “not the novel of Jewish fate.” If that’s all it was, it might be of only historical interest, yet who among its twenty-first century readers could fail to find its account of a liberal, cosmopolitan culture’s downfall distressingly resonant?
Ran across this fascinating toy that lets you see the night sky from any point on earth at any time in history.
Hey folks, I need to ask a favor if anyone has a few minutes. I am replacing my SquareSpace woodworking website with a new, hand-built one and would like a few people to test it out for me: look around, see if you run into any problems, and reply here or send me a message through the contact form.
There is no online store as such, only an email-request form. So you might even choose a carving, click “request purchase” and try out that functionality, with a note saying you don’t actually want it and are just testing. I’ll make the same offer here I’m planning to put out on my email list: if you do that, and there’s ever anything you actually do want, I’ll give you a 10% discount (max $20).
Here’s the link to the beta version.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Proposition: Video replay should be used, if it is used at all, only to correct on-field, real-time calls that may by objective standards have been incorrect: was the ball fair or foul, was the runner safe or out, was the receiver’s foot in or out of bounds, did the puck cross the line. Video replay should never be used to make or alter subjective judgments. Given enough time and analysis I can prove virtually anything you like, and so can a referee with multiple camera angles and slow-motion.
Stories of European tourists being pleasantly surprised that we’re not all ogres over here have me thinking of Frances Trollope and remembering that I should be glad Americans don’t spit as much as we used to.
Granted I chose my angles carefully, but the native perennials have managed this well so far without any city water, only what’s fallen from the sky.
“May Song II.” Four panels in a reclaimed window, 20×25 inches. The text is my somewhat free translation of a portion of Goethe’s poem “Mailied,” and all but one of the flowers depicted are drawn from photos of my front-yard flower meadow (in past years, when it rained).
Rain barrel installed, after two additional (unforeseen but unsurprising) trips to Lowe’s. Now I expect either the eastern piedmont will turn into a temperate rain forest, or it will never rain again and we’ll all wind up as extras in a film version of Ezekiel 37.
